Prof. Dr. Jan Rath received his MA Degree in cultural anthropology and urban studies and his PhD from Utrecht University. He is emeritus Professor of Urban Sociology in the Department of Sociology and researcher at the Center for Urban Studies of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) in the same university.
He is also the President of UvA’s University Forum, that aims to facilitate intellectual debate about the UvA, its values and strategies, and its future. Jan Rath is, moreover, the European Chair of International Metropolis, an associate of the World Economic Forum, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) within the University of Oxford. He has been an advisor of a wide array of local, national and supranational governmental organizations and civic society institutions, including the European Commission, the OECD, and the United Nations (notably the IOM, UNHCR, UNCTAD, and the Population Division).
He has been active in various other disciplines, such as political science, sociology of law, economics and economic sociology. He previously held academic posts at the Center for the Study of Social Conflicts (COMT) in Leiden University, the Center for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Society (SMES) in Utrecht University, the Institute for the Sociology of Law in the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Department of Sociology in the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and Koc University in Istanbul.
Finally, he was appointed to Prof. J.A.A. van Doorn Chair at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in the academic year 2021/2022. In the same period, he served as the Van Doorn Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), one of the institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The chair and fellowship were an homage to the founder of the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB), Prof. Jacques van Doorn. Jan Rath dedicated his time to the study of urban amenities, cultural consumption, and the proliferation of new middle-class lifestyles and identities, or — more concretely — to coffee bars, craft beer breweries, home decoration stores, street food trucks, and other hipsterish places, among other things.